The present invention relates to eyewear and in particular to Pince-Nez eyeglasses (i.e., two lens eyewear lacking temple pieces) that are comfortable, stable and have universal fit while still having full sized optics. The eyeglasses of this invention are also thin, light and easily stored.
There are over 40 million people in the US that use reading glasses known as readers. Current readers typically purchased in a drug store or other mass merchandisers are designed to fit most people by using the nose as a resting place. Since nose width, angle and shape vary considerably among users, standard readers achieve their stability via the temple pieces placed above and behind the user's ears.
Users wear readers at a different place down their nose in order to allow them to look over the lenses of the readers and to change the distance from the lens to the eye to adjust their effective power. The temple pieces of standard readers are usually long enough to accommodate these different positions without loss of stability of the eyeglasses on the user's face.
Most Pince-Nez eyeglasses apply a significant clamping force on the nose in order to stabilize the lenses on the wearer's face. To provide a universal fit, Pince-Nez eyeglasses should accommodate noses of varying sizes and shapes at varying wearing locations while maintaining stability without user discomfort. Many Pince-Nez eyeglass designs fail to meet this standard, however. For example, while attaching Pince-Nez eyeglasses on the pliable tissues over the nostrils might help attach the eyeglasses to any size nose, most users would find this attachment location to be uncomfortable because it restricts breathing, and the glasses would be too far away from the eyes.
Another common problem with readers is their availability when needed. While the temple pieces of standard readers can be folded toward the lenses to reduce the storage size of the eyeglasses, the temple pieces take up storage space, and the overall volume of the storage configuration of the readers may limit their accessibility. Because Pince-Nez eyeglasses do not have temple pieces, they present new opportunities for storage and accessibility.